


All of Your Flaws And All of My Flaws

by maddieaddam



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Bromance, Canon-Typical Violence, Found Family, Gen, Period-Typical Racism, Slurs, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-05 02:06:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10295072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maddieaddam/pseuds/maddieaddam
Summary: One of the newest pack of marines to join the war in the Pacific, freshly christened as Snafu, gets a handle on life at war and learns how to get along with brothers of a different sort of blood.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction inspired by and only intended to represent the roles played in the HBO miniseries The Pacific. No disrespect is meant to the real men of 1st Marine Division. 
> 
> My first fic in The Pacific fandom! A very short piece about my fav brot3 and how they got on before we saw them as seasoned veterans in the show. Title is from Flaws by Bastille.

Cape Gloucester is more of a nightmare awake than asleep, at least when Snafu can tell the difference between the two. He blinks and still sees pitch darkness when he opens his eyes, darker than even the night of a new moon over the bayou, then flinches as a flash of lightning affords him a few precious seconds of vision. In that time, he must kill everything that moves.

He thought he’d feel some sort of impact when he killed his first man, like a heavy stone dropping into his gut, but he hardly has time to mark the first before the second falls beside that one, then the third, then the fourth. They run at him in ceaseless waves and he thinks, wildly, don’t they care? Don’t they have any love for their lives at all? Don’t they have anyone who will miss them?

One of the Guadalcanal veterans, a man with curly hair a bit like his, tells him about kamikaze pilots and how intensely the Japanese believe in death before dishonour and seppuku and the emperor as a child of the gods. Then he says not to think of the people he’s here to slaughter en masse in such human terms.

The suggestion is easy enough to follow. And besides, he has no great love for his life, and doesn’t have anyone who’ll miss him, either.

Burgie (given names _Romus Valton_ , and Snafu thought he was hurting with the name Merriell) is better at compartmentalizing all of their experiences than Snafu, while Jay (last name De L’Eau, and nearly startled out of his skin when Snafu demands to know if it’s him who brought all this rain when he hears it) is worse. Neither comes as much of a surprise to Snafu, because Burgie was as confident and charming in Melbourne as Jay was shy and antsy, which gave him a pretty good idea of their personalities at base level; Burgie also gave him his new moniker after he made a particularly bad joke about Australian money coming in pounds and ounces, which told him that while Burgie has a very low bar for weird, he also takes things that fly well above it in good-natured stride.

Jay thinks too much. He obsesses over every worrying thought that comes into his head until he’s acting and talking like it’s completely real. For days after the initial suicide attack, he’s forever pulling Snafu aside to whisper about how the Japs have probably been following all this time, peering at them through the waxy green leaves and fronds, and are only lulling them into a false sense of security before swarming them in numbers they can’t even begin to imagine. His eyes are massive when he says it, his hands clenched tight around Snafu’s forearm.

“Fuck’s sake, Jay,” Snafu finally drawls when he’s heard about enough, “how secure we gotta fuckin’ be before they pounce, ‘cause right now I’m about ready to settle down and buy a house with ‘em, maybe have a couple rugrats together, I’m so goddamn secure.”

Jay still looks deeply hurt when Burgie comes to collect them after a few moments of awkward silence, but his expression has shifted to chastised by the time they get back on the move, and at least somewhat in his right mind an hour or two later. Snafu thinks he dealt with it the right way.

“You gotta be more gentle with him,” Burgie says later, when the two of them are huddled in their tent and glaring out at the rain, equally unable to fall asleep. “Firm, but gentle.”

“Don’t tell me that li’l shit snitched on me.”

“I won’t, ‘cause he didn’t. I overheard y’all talkin’.”

Sometimes Burgie gets the kind of look on his face that Snafu’s always seen on his eldest brothers when they come home to visit and get a good dose of him: half disapproving and half despairing, like they can’t condone the existence of someone like him, but they also aren’t about to blame anyone for how he turned out because he seems like such an unstoppable force of nature. He swings between proud and furious every time he endures it from them, but when Burgie looks at him that way, he just feels guilty right to the tips of his toes.

“The kid’s drivin’ himself off the fuckin’ deep end, Burgie,” Snafu says, more sullenly than he’d like given that he’s trying to defend himself. “Can’t coddle that shit, we gotta snap him out of it.”

“Ain’t you ever heard of tough love?” Burgie asks with a winning smile, almost too bright for its murky surroundings.

“Sure,” Snafu says with a smirk to counter that smile, “just don’t believe in it.”

“What’s there to not believe in ‘bout it?”

_Love_ , Snafu thinks, but he just lies back down and closes his eyes instead of answering aloud. Behind his eyelids, the darkness is less complete than when they were open.


End file.
